Funerals are very quiet here.

Devastan is otherwise a very busy place. Warlordism, plague, famine, disaster, and general chaos are still on rotating cycles throughout the country, although far less now than in our grandparents' time. Nine thousand years of racial strife, decentralized government, and flood-based farming systems have made the country fascinating, loud, and totally ungovernable. Say what you will, but the funerals are quiet, no matter the religion, caste, or creed of those who conduct them.

Dry Lake is in a working-class district within a twenty-minute trolley ride of New Amritsar. It is a mainly Sikh neighborhood, and Sikhs had quiet funerals even in the old world. The Temple of Perpetual Beginning is the cornerstone of this community, and in a small, badly painted room at the back of the temple, I have been waiting with the elder men of the Chattha family in the newly customary 24-hour vigil following the death of Savraj Kaur Chattha, grandmother to Jitinder Singh, mother of Ritsur Singh, and wife of Yash Singh.

It has been a very solemn day, for grandfather Yash most of all. Like most easterners, the Sikhs see death as a much more natural transition between life and death, as they believe the soul is not tied to the body in the slightest, and that the latter is merely a shell, justifying the widespread cremation in Devastan, although this may have as much to do with stemming the Plague than any quaint cultural reason.

Having passed away due to a stroke in Al-Jahiz Memorial Hospital not three kilometers away from the Chatthas' Dry Lake home, Savraj Kaur's body was then shuttled immediately by ambulance to the Temple of Perpetual Beginning. A gaudy and aging structure, she is probably the best maintained in the neighborhood due to high rates of tithing here as well as the fact that it serves as town hall, judiciary, post office, day care center, and nightclub for most of the service-starved community, ever on the cusp of middle-class status but very rarely accumulating any true capital.

Within three hours of her body reaching the temple, the portion of the Chattha family who is going to attend has arrived by now. As previously stated, it is a quiet, although not particularly solemn affair. Few are sad, although some of the men who will be keeping vigil in that ghastly charnel later that evening are frightened. Largely, the funeral consists of telling honest stories about Mme. Chattha's life, both uplifting, sad, disappointing, and encouraging. As the Sikh religion revolves around the noble but false pursuit of a temporary joining with a trans-substantiary “God,” the funeral is largely another step in the reminder that life is full of comings and goings, and a reminder to be detached and prayerful in this world in the futile hope that this will somehow break the cycle of death and rebirth. After about an hour of hymns, traditional poetry, and eulogizing, the majority of the Chatthas move to the home of Mme. Chattha's son, where she lived until her death. The informal majority of the funeral will take place at this reception. The eldest son, husband, and eldest grandson remain in the temple, as I do, and we follow an acolyte dressed in sterile white medical scrubs and licensed by the Devastani Environmental Defense Council to the cremation room in the back. The room is a small, tiled fortress, tucked away behind layers of walls but still within short distance of the main audience chamber.

We sit together on a pew bench, facing the untreated and unkept body of Mme. Chattha, barely glanced at during the as-always closed casket funeral. I do not envy the Devastani for having to literally stare death in the face with every passing parent, cousin, or sibling, and pray that their environmental controls are able to keep this Plague at bay. We sit for several hours, thinking, and closely monitoring the various monitors of heart rate, muscle and nervous activity. After a long night of prayer, fasting, and taking turns on watch, we all wonder if it will really work this time. There is a quiet air of hope as the Chatthas sing the traditional folksongs of their region and culture and ask for me to share my own hymns and stories from the pan-Ibrahimi states. Only the grandson, Jitinder Singh, is especially nervous. This is his first vigil, he tells me quietly, and gives his father a queer look, perhaps wondering what this will be like again in twenty or forty or sixty years, staring at his father's face. Lapsing into pessimism, I think of my own father and mother.

Jitinder twitches every few minutes, though no change in Mme. Chattha's vitals is apparent. He swears that he sees fingers twitch or hears growing moans that no one else can hear. The acolyte/nurse gives him a cup of herbal tea, which seems to quiet him for a while, and whispers to me that sometimes the young can sense the soul returning to the body's empty shell, and they are sensitive to things adults have grown numb to.

“I've never seen a body not reanimate, not in eight years serving the temple, and not during the four vigils I've held for my own family. They always come back. It's never the same person, but they always come back,” says the acolyte, Rajpur Singh Ghee, who also lives in Dry Lake with his extended family and belongs to the same caste as the Chattas.

And so it is, after nine hours of keeping vigil, three awkwardly shared and badly translated magazines, and dozens of songs and stories, we begin to see the signs. Jitinder and his father Ritsur are grey and ashen, although Yash is beginning to break a sweat in this cold little room.

A finger twitches, this time we all see it. Then the hand moves and the jaw flexes. A knee bends, then overextends. The corpse begins to move as an infant does, without knowing its own body or how to control it, it marvels at and struggles against the uncontrolled movement of its own limbs.

Grandfather Yash is silent, but Ritsur simply sighs and says to the acolyte, “This is not my mother. I know the movement and mumbles of my mother, and these are not her movements, nor her groans.” M. Ghee nods solemnly, although I believe there is less sure confidence and pride in his voice than before when he begins to say the final prayers of the Sikhs, the Kirtan Sohila and Antim Ardas.

The three Chattha men chant in singsong unison. I respectfully remain silent during the ceremony, about ten minutes of rhythmic chanting and singing while this not-woman writhes, restrained loosely on a stone slab across the room.

The last lines of the Kirtan Sohila are sung out, translated: “Oh, Inner-Knower, Searcher of Hearts, O Primal Being, Architecht of Destiny, please fulfill this yearning of my mind/Your slave begs this happiness: Let me be the Dust of the Feet of the Saints.”

In response, the not-woman on the slab stares straight at us, eyes bursting red, and garbles out the Plague victims' strange, always-constant response: “Glory to the Parabola!”

With that, an ashen Ritsur mumbles, “Waheguru,” and presses the button to begin the cremation. A stone slab peels down from the wall and traps the not-woman in her undeath furnace. A few minutes later, a tiny urn with Mme. Chattha's ashes in it is interred with a brief prayer into the fortified vault-crypt under the temple. A small wheeled trolley like a dumbwaiter lowers the ashes into the crypt, as the clay soil surrounding the temple (a legal requirement for the disposal of Deadland ashes) makes it difficult for humans to access the crypts themselves.

“It was a good burial,” mutters Ritsur. He has attended several more than his father Yash, as the Plague only began truly spreading during his generation. “Very clean. Now my mother's body is free to travel along the cycle of life and death, or escape it, if she can.”

I do not envy the heathen Devastani. I do not even wish them particularly well, as they are lunatics and genocidal abortionists and pedagogues and pedarastic drunkards, and the Deadland Plague may well be divine retribution killing off their culture as it did the Roman Empire or as the cancer plague killed of nascent New America and the heretical Middle Kingdom. Some of my more reactionary colleagues at the Al-Aqsa Anabaptist Press may contend so, although I do believe that the Devastani are righteous unbelievers and our alliance with them against the socialists in newly independent Hell is sound.

For when I think of my travels through Devastan these past months, and I think of all the evils and chaos I have seen hiking through the hopeless slums and warlord-owned hinterlands, I remember the evil they have faced, so we have not. I remember poor Ritsur staring at the face of his mother until he was sure that it was no longer her face he gazed upon, and grandfather Yash watching in horror as the slowly expanding radius of the Deadlands began to claim first his factory, then his neighborhood, then his wife, as it will eventually take him.

I urge you as free and honorable men of Purgatory to remember the Word: “He that is unjust, let him be unjust still, and he which is filthy let him be filthy still, and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still, and he that is holy, let him be holy still...My rewards is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he has done.” Let us give the Devastani the weapons, loans, and Manna drug which they have earned, by toiling in our proxy. If they are simply toiling at a task which can never be won, then we have lost nothing, and if they can be successful, we need not fear their success, for they are idolaters and wastrels and ignorant motherfuckers, and they will perish by their own sin when their culture is next tested, not by disease nor war nor famine, for they are built to withstand and even propagate such sins, but their culture's true test will be the light of truth and the warmth of honesty, against which darkness can make no possible gain.

For Thine is the Kingdom. Amen.

---Excerpt, Stephan Virtuous Hussain, “Hard Times in the Devastani Deadlands,” translated from original German in Lebensbaum Allgemeine Zeitung, Faustian Federal City of Sinaijing, 1921 Anno Tornare, pages A1, A10-12.